Lempriere's Dictionary Read online

  News turned to anecdotes, anecdotes to rumour, to flotsam carried on the sea-surface, altered and washed up in the port of London where the investors combed the wharves for whatever they might find until they were forced to admit that the gleaned scraps told them nothing. Thereafter, they contented themselves in discussion and plotting the desired course on maps. Their carefully drawn lines soon reached the area where the coasts became speculation and their apprehension grew.

  They need not have fretted, thought the distant figure on the jetty. Almost two centuries later, he had read Lancaster’s log and observed in its terse catalogue of incidents and bearings a continuing acknowledgement of his fleet’s endeavour. Lancaster himself had emerged as a man built upon an inflexible determination to carry the voyage and all else before him or perish in the attempt. As the ships sailed on, the task entrusted to him became all his being and he saw each day’s progress as an additional, strengthening fibre in the fabric of himself.

  The fleet had sailed south, reaching the Canaries on the seventh of May and the Tropic five days after that. Scurvy held off till August, then claimed a round hundred. They doubled the Cape on the first of November. A storm saw them through the Christmas of 1600, taking two anchors with it. They weathered that and those that followed, but the shoals of Adu almost claimed them. Hedged about by rocks with barely four fathoms, the pinnace was sent out to find a channel; found one, praise God. May came with fair winds and a sighting of Nicobar. June gave them Dachen and Dachen would give them their first boatload of pepper.

  As the fleet sailed into the mouth of the Malacca Straits on the evening of the last day of June, the mariners saw the light of a hundred fires ranged along the coast. They burned all night and on the morrow Captain Lancaster took the row-boat ashore. The king of Dachen welcomed Lancaster and his men with fresh fruit and mutton roasted over charcoal. Lancaster gave the king a silver tray and showed him his letters of patent. The king sent his greetings to her Majesty in return and gave Lancaster an elephant. The Dutch were a surly lot, thought the king, and haggled well. He would do business with the Englanders. In August, Lancaster discovered the root of their fulsome welcome. It lay in Bantam, only a few days’ sail through the Malacca Straits. The king of Bantam had pepper to sell too; at a third of the price. An adjustment was proposed in Dachen and a new price negotiated. The English were as surly as the Dutch, concluded the king, and he resolved that henceforth the traders would be denied the hospitality of his table. The elephant was returned.

  The four ships sailed between Dachen and Bantam, bartering for pepper, buying when they had no choice. The sailors liked the easy days’ sailing between anchorages while the merchants complained of delays, lading pepper into the holds and counting, always counting. The Dutch, when encountered at all, seemed almost to encourage them in their dealings. Their complaisance aroused Lancaster’s suspicion but he could discover no deeper purpose behind it in the weeks that followed; besides, trade was good. The summer and winter passed this way. A trading post was set up on Bantam and in the following February, with the holds full to bursting, Captain James Lancaster decided that time had arrived to begin the long journey home. On the twentieth day of August 1602, the four ships raised their anchors, fired off their ordnance and set sail for England.

  In London, the investors had relapsed into helpless calm. They had not given up hope, and they had not given up waiting. But their expectancy had turned in on itself when it could no longer be contented with news. Now it was only the elapse of time. Although they met frequently enough, they no longer spoke of the four ships. They had heard nothing for two years. Their encounters were tense, hearty affairs, each singly aware of what now seemed their joint failure. Their thirst for adventure had diminished considerably and it appeared that nothing might revive it.

  Their pessimism was to prove ill-founded however, for two oceans away, the roof of the world was lifting over the Indies. As the pressure dropped it drew in the winds and sent them gusting across the Indian Ocean where Captain Lancaster recognised them for what they were and hoisted all the canvas he had. The monsoon would carry them home.

  First word of the fleet’s return arrived in unspectacular fashion by way of a French merchant who arrived in London to buy tallow. Tallow was not Julien Beaudeguerre’s usual line and England was not his usual market. Ordinarily, he bought carpets from the Moriscos, selling them to the wealthier burghers of Provence. Tallow was his cousin’s business, but he had fallen ill a week after landing the contract for a lodge north of Arles. A misfortune for everyone, but in particular for Julien. He had been prevailed upon. He had succumbed. He was here. Tallow was tedious stuff and his Morisco friends had not been pleased. They had proposed sending their rugs and carpets by ship to be collected by him in London. They had heard that a small fleet was making its way up the coast from their trading partners in Africa. Julien should seek news of them in London on the off-chance that this unlikely plan might work. Three days after his arrival, Julien duly began repeating what his Moorish friends had told him and he bent the ear of every mariner, water-man and wharf rat he could find. No-one could confirm or deny the five words that he laboriously spread about the port but when his phrase reached the ears of Philpot, De Vere and the other investors it lit their resigned acceptance of loss with a faint glimmer of hope. ‘An ‘Ector and tre others’ was Julien’s only English.

  The process by which the fleet had faded from sight to rumour and thence to nothing had begun to reverse itself along with the Trades that were bringing them home. Beaudeguerre’s scrap was followed by others. All four were safe, said one report. All three, said another. Their holds were full and their holds were empty. Their crews were dead men kept alive by a strange light on the mast-head and they were pulled through the sea by mermaids. Word went around that a Frenchman had got ten guineas from Philpot and De Vere for his news and a flourishing trade sprang up in Shadwell where plausible stories were concocted to be sold to the waiting investors. The investors saw through these fabrications but paid anyway. They mentioned them casually to each other, laughing at the more fanciful. A report that the Saint Anthony had been captured and a cargo of silver taken proved popular enough to be sold twice. News grew more frequent in the weeks that followed Beaudeguerre’s arrival and the more blatant contradictions and wilder flights of fancy diminished. There were indeed four ships. And their holds were full to bursting. On the twenty-first day of September 1602 they were sighted off the Downs. The investors no longer tried to contain their delight. Surely, their boldness had paid off. Two days later, they learned for the first time that the cargo was pepper and knew then that their original daring, the assiduous maintenance of their hope and new expectation of its fulfilment were as nothing, not even dust, to the devious reversals of fate.

  The four ships sailed up the Thames on the morning tide like women of strong virtue. A thousand seducers had courted them with destruction and they bore the scars of rebuffal proudly to prove it. Their masts were split, their sails patched and their sides a motley of leaking and replaced planks. The sea was an insistent lover. Aboard the Dragon, Captain Lancaster led his four vessels to where the pilot met them and picked a course through the shoals and sandbanks of the Thames. They moved slowly upstream towards Blackwall, whence they had set out almost three years before. He thought of the pepper which filled the holds, one million pounds of it, and the price it would bring. Eight shillings for every one of those pounds. The men had almost mutinied during the return and the ship had almost fallen apart, but they had returned intact and his heart was full of England. The crowds that had sent them off in such magnificence were no longer there, but London looked much as it ever had. As did his sponsors, the investors, whom he could see on the quayside as he approached the dock.

  Philpot, Alexander Smith, De Vere and the others had met that morning and travelled together to Blackwall. When the four ships had set out, three years before, the investors had imagined all the possible fates which might befall th
em. They had foreseen shipwreck, mutiny, disease and death at the hands of natives. Their dreams had been of ships sinking in every imaginable circumstance: driven onto rocks, colliding in the night, attacked by whales and turned to funeral pyres by fire on board. They had thought that should the ships return with their holds full, there were no more perils or disasters to be considered. But now, as Captain Lancaster ordered all hands on deck to oversee their final negotiation through the entrance to the docks, he noticed a downcast air about the investors that had not been apparent from further down the river. How could they have known that the fate of the expedition lay not in the treacherous shoals off Adu, nor the storms around the Cape, nor even in the murderous whim of some distant, black-faced pashar? The fair winds and calm seas that had brought the expedition home safely had not benefited them alone. Scarcely a vessel had been lost on the East Indies route all that year; a fact which had helped keep hope alive in London. The Dutch fleet had brought back a cargo only weeks before that exceeded Lancaster’s many times over. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, it too was pepper, and in quantities that could only be described as a glut. The market had held for a week, wavered, faltered then dropped like a stone. Eight shillings a pound? One was the best price on offer, and hardly a buyer then. As Captain Lancaster bounded down the gang-plank to greet his colleagues in their triumph, it was all the group on the quayside could do to look him in the eye. The cargoes of the four ships that docked at Blackwall after a journey of two years and 22,000 miles were worth little more than sand and the Honourable Company less than that.

  In the days that followed their initial, bitter disappointment turned to the deepest gloom. The price fell further and the few remaining buyers departed for the continent. Worry visited each of them and, hard on its heels, their creditors. The part-paid shipwrights, chandlers and victuallers learned soon enough of their difficulties and became nervous in turn. They called daily upon the investors and became brusque in their demands. The investors assured them that buyers had been found, it was only a matter of waiting. The creditors did not want to wait; they wanted their money. One million pounds of pepper lay in a warehouse at Poplar, unwanted. The investors met to resolve their difficulties but could decide on nothing. They would stand firm together and reaffirmed their faith in each other as good fellows and venturers worthy of the name. But solidarity would not pay their debts. What should they do? None of them knew.

  No, thought the figure on the jetty, none of them knew. Ignorance and disarray: the beginning, when the Rochelais would wait no longer. The trail began to break up. He could find only brief scenes after that, glimpses of what must have taken place.

  By the spring of the following year they would have known no more. The creditors would have called less frequently, not at all when they realised there was nothing to be had. The investors had been relieved, even knowing that the courts could not be far behind this respite. Alexander Smith had filed his bankruptcy in March. They could do nothing but wait for salvation without expectation or hope of its arrival and in this desperate conviction they were, as before, quite mistaken.

  No-one would have paid any attention to the nine men walking down the gang-plank in April of that year. They exchanged small talk in an undertone. No-one heard what they said. Lodgings were taken above Lombard Street, but they were not seen there, nor at Saint Paul’s nor even at the market. They did not frequent the taverns. They stayed four days, then left. All nine had waited patiently since the day when they had watched the fleet set sail from Blackwall. Three years later, their business in London was brief and to the point.

  The solitary figure imagined their boat sailing away, hazy, out of sight, as it ever was. Out of reach, even of the investors who were left then with their averted ruin and the sense of mutual betrayal that was its price.

  Their solidarity had only existed by default. They had no choice but to maintain it. No buyer had split their unity because there were no buyers. Then, out of the blue, came the meetings. Arranged through intermediaries, mention of a small proposition, curiosity driving each to receive his visitor. Dark, foreign accents, courteous. All alike, save one. Then the offers for the stock, nominal amounts, accepted immediately, their company and its debts transferred at a stroke. Solidarity and their common cause would not save any one of them. Singly and unaware of the other, identical meetings, they would each have signed the agreements. Business was business. They were not children.

  Fools and their money, thought the lone sitter. Even centuries away, he recognised the stealthy discretion of the Nine. It could only be theirs. He shivered in the cold sunlight.

  Rochelle! A boat sliding past the twin turrets to enter the harbour. The long wait over, the stratagem brought to a close. Nine men breaking silence at last, laughing down the quay. They had what they wanted. Their leader, Zamorin, white hair standing out from the dark of his fellows. The end of one campaign and the beginning of another. A new spirit, a slogan to take them further; the resolution of their secret comradeship and a name for it. A joke to begin with, perhaps. Later only the truth.

  He mouthed the name, heard for the first time only days before. He had not laughed. New to me as you, François. Or was it your creation? The new proprietors of the Honourable Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies would call themselves the Cabbala. He rubbed his eyes again. The trail was all but gone, rag-ends and splinters.

  Other years, other voyages. Mounted by their new-found agents, bound in silence by betrayal, in honesty by fear. And profit. No, they were not children. The riches piled up as you knew they would. Very shrewd, François.

  The crew had piled crates as high as they would go, forming a low tower in the pacquet’s stern. The last few would be lashed down in the bows. A sailor was leading a woman down the gang-plank, leading her by the hand. The Nottingham had disappeared and the last fragments of his vision flew after it. But it is mine still, he thought. You are still mine, François. The woman stumbled in her nervousness. You are mine or nothing, all of you. His face was grim again.

  Riches even beyond their calculation. Influence even beyond their needs. The nine of them, moving further and further out, never looking back and never thinking that Rochelle itself might be where fortune would take her due. A fatal flaw, waiting for them in their neglect.

  A single cloud passed high overhead, darkening the water, the boat and the jetty. The tide was running faster. He could hear it rushing against the wooden piles that supported the jetty beneath him. The woman had recovered her step. He thought of the lost girl. Not here and not now.

  His anger seeped back in slow waves which rose and fell against the memory of the episode he had summoned up and whose recession seemed to invite it on. They lived on in his outrage and it was their story still. Forgive them. Father? Another unavenged. He thought of the tableau by the shadowed pool, high trees reaching up for the last of the summer sky and the water, red on grey, anger on forgetting. My own beginning, he realised. The beginning of my story, sea-fringed granite, red island in the grey-green sea, home. It seemed so distant, more distant than the Indies. And so long ago! A year, he told himself, only that. But a year like an age and its passing, far older than the first voyage. Impossible time. The young man felt his anger draw back, revealing slow puzzlement beneath. He recognised it as the onset of curiosity which had led him here, guiding his steps through a maze they had planted about him. But as he grasped it in this way, it too dissolved and fear rose to take its place. Then he realised that it was he who was falling, through the succession of his feelings and their memories, crashing through the decks of himself. Fear of pain, fear of blindness; childhood terrors, he dismissed them. Fear of the dead and his own guilt, closer, fear of death as the hard hand pushed him forward, the knife an inch from his throat, fear of losing her. He reached out to grasp the memory, but she slipped away, receding as fear fell away too, carrying her off and he was left alone. On the very lowest deck in the pitch dark and not a sound to be heard. Solitude was the last s
tage before the cold sea below. Solitude was a familiar. A young boy of four or five, pretending to read the Greek script, motionless over the page for hours on end, looking into himself. Older, surrounded by the rustling voices of his books and their protective murmur. A lie. The last deck splintered, gave way under his feet and he was falling through into the cold hands below that waited, wanting only to show him the secret beyond solitude, but he was not ready for that, not yet, and he would wait a little longer as the water tried to close over his head, rising up and shuddering back to cold flesh and bone, alone on the jetty.

  My life, he thought with dispassion, hardly distracted by the shrill cry from further up the quay. My own beginning. Jersey was still his, even if all else was gone. He could recall it at will. His parents’ house slid back easily to him, and the nights that he knew he would now find eerie, for the intervening year had changed him. High above his head, the cloud passed on, freeing the sun’s rays to dazzle him and the crewman shouted up. The last one left. He started, but he would not give up the memory. He rose, sun-blinded, and felt it flood back into him. Stooping for the chest, he looked up as the quay emerged from white, breaking in on his thoughts for a moment, then falling back to the remembered island’s dark and he saw a slight figure waving, impossibly distant through the depth and silence of Jersey’s night as it came down upon him. Where he had embarked and his journey had begun, his beginning gathered about him as the sailor shouted again and he would not let it go, not then for the love of God, not there for the wealth of the Indies, nor ever save for her and the last call to the voyage out as it reached him across the waves on the island of his childhood.